Articles written by Wasim Ahmad

I’ve covered protests in my time as a photojournalist and photojournalism educator, and there are always a chorus of conspiracy theorists postulating that by posting photos that show protestors’ faces, you’re setting them up to later be hunted down and killed and/or imprisoned. The thing is, a leaked phone call on Monday of President Donald Trump talking to the nation’s governors has all but confirmed that this is happening, or at least that the ostensible leader of the U.S. government wants this to happen.

In the automotive world, there’s a saying that there’s no replacement for displacement — a bigger engine is a bigger engine, and that’s all there is to it. One can say that this is the approach that Kandao is taking with its new QooCam 8K: more resolution and larger sensor sizes that make for quite an appealing 360 camera on paper and, as it turns out, in real life too.

If you’re the parent of small children in this global pandemic, stop right now and order a drone. It will keep you (photographically) sane during what is most definitely a trying time. It certainly has helped me.

There’s been lots of (digital) ink spilled about how great Fujifilm cameras feel to use. While I share many of those sentiments, there’s another seemingly oddball camera brand that I find myself reaching for, even when I have (ostensibly) much better options available: Olympus. Here’s a look at why I often find myself reaching for the company’s pint-size powerhouses.

Like the rest of the country, even presidential candidates find themselves sheltering in place during this global pandemic. Unlike the rest of the country, those candidates still need a way to get their message out. Enter Joe Biden’s fascinating home studio setup.

The new iPhone SE looks mighty tempting to photographers hanging on for dear life to their older generation iPhones. It brings the promise of combining the smarts of the A13 Bionic chip with a single camera unit in a body similar to the iPhone 8, but does that help it’s photography any? Not much, it seems.

I’m no expert in flying a drone. You can see that from my first flight that ended in a Mavic-destroying crash. But while my drone awaits repairs, I decided to dive deep in learning to make sure I have some best practices under my belt before taking to the skies again.

The first time you do anything, you’re bound to do it poorly. The first time I shot football, I thought a 1/200 s shutter speed would be perfectly fine to stop action. The first time I shot portraits, I thought my f/1.6 photos were perfectly sharp (they were not even close). And the first time I flew a drone was a catastrophe worse than both of those experiences.

Like many photographers in quarantine, I’ve been trying to get creative without the ability to get out. I’ve had a lot of gear sitting around that doesn’t get much use, and so I’ve gone through my boxes to dust them off and see what’s possible. One gem I had forgotten about was the FotodioX Mount Adapter that lets me mount my Nikon F glass to my Micro Four Thirds cameras.

The Fujifilm X-T200 looks like it swallowed an iPhone. With a screen size that matches that of a previous-generation iPhone 4, it might as well have. It's this screen that is the camera's most significant selling point, boldly signaling to smartphone users to put down their poor, small-sensor cameras to embrace this instead. It primarily works for its intended audience, with a few caveats.

We all live in Zoom right now. With the global pandemic, chances are your client meetings aren’t happening in person anymore. But while your photography gigs may have temporarily dried up, you still have to put your game face on, even if it’s via videoconference. Here’s some gear to help you do that.

Photojournalism is a contact sport. Or at least it used to be, before the coronavirus rolled into town. Despite the health risks with taking photographs of people in close quarters or crowds, photographers at news organizations around the country are still, more or less, on the job.

There are times when I've wanted to photograph people, but haven't had any around to flex my photographic skills. That's when I've been able to turn to a subject that's always available and willing to work on my schedule: me.

Being a photographer with a “real” camera always carries risk. People well within their rights to photograph in public are harassed online all the time. I’d argue, though, that being a brown person in the United States adds an extra layer of risk that other photographers don’t face, namely fears that you’re a terrorist taking photographs to plan for a future attack.

When I’m working with new photographers, something I’ve noticed is how carefully they store their DSLRs by removing the lens, placing caps and covers on everything, and gingerly ensconcing their entire setup into a branded bag. Sometimes they’ll even remove the battery and SD card, too. I can’t remember the last time I’ve stored cameras this way.

For years I’ve been rocking the same DSLR bodies as my main cameras — a Nikon D750 and a D700. They’ve never been wanting for anything I shoot. But recently I had the occasion to spend some time with the Canon EOS R and I discovered the one major advancement I’ve been missing out on as a DSLR shooter: Eye-Detection AF.

If you store your videos and photos in the cloud, or at least in Google’s version of the cloud, you may want to think twice about that. A recent privacy breach may have sent your videos to the wrong person.

Like many 30-somethings, I came of age during a time when photography was transitioning from film to pixels. Entire years of my life were captured with early consumer and professional-grade digital cameras, and now I’m left feeling like that was a big mistake.

While some 360 cameras such as the Insta360 One X and GoPro Max 360 have become household names in the budding immersive photo/video market, there are plenty out there to choose from, most though from brands you’ve never heard of. YouTuber Ben Claremont cuts through the noise and takes a look at what some of the best options are in early 2020.

Wasim Ahmad has been a journalist for newspapers in Minnesota, Florida and upstate New York. He's also spent almost eight years as a multimedia journalism instructor at Stony Brook University and Syracuse University (where he got his master's degree in photography). Somewhere along the way he also worked as a technical specialist for Canon USA on their EOS DSLR cameras.